Customer call centers, or simply, “call centers,” are often the first point of contact for customers seeking direct assistance from manufacturers and service vendors. Call centers are reachable by telephone, including data network-based telephone services, such as Voice-Over-Internet (VoIP), and provide customer support and problem resolution. Although Worldwide Web- and email-based customer support are becoming increasingly available, call centers still offer a convenient and universally-accessible forum for remote customer assistance.
The timeliness and quality of service provided by call centers is critical to ensuring customer satisfaction, particularly where caller responses are generated through automation. Generally, the expectation level of callers is lower when they are aware that an automated system, rather than a live human agent, is providing assistance. However, customers become less tolerant of delays, particularly when the delays occur before every automated system-generated response. Minimizing delays is crucial, even when caller volume is high.
To properly service callers, agents frequently need to perform troubleshooting or diagnosis to identify the cause of the problem or service required. Fully automated interactive voice recognition (IVR) based call centers rely on scripted exchanges with callers that are intended to elicit specific information in a predefined sequence, which may not be user-friendly or responsive to urgent needs. In addition, while some of the information may be critical to resolving the situation, other information may not be essential and could either be deferred or omitted entirely.
Fully automated system interfaces generally are not as user friendly as a live agent, as interacting with the automated system through a scripted caller interface may be awkward or uncomfortable to callers. Moreover, callers that are under stress or in a hurry may be unable or unwilling to answer questions in a particular order, preferring answering questions through regular conversational speech in a free form format. As a result, an inflexible script could force a loss of information or require repeated questions, which can in turn lead to decreased caller experience due to frustration or loss of confidence.
Therefore, there is a need to accommodate non-sequential and non-linear information gathering by call center agents, which allows caller interactions to progress free form in a more natural and conversational order than might ordinarily be experienced with automated caller response systems.